VAUVENARGUES, LUC DE CLAPIERS, MARQUIS DE (1715-1747), French moralist and miscellaneous writer, was born at Aix in Provence on Aug. 6, 1715. His family was poor though noble; he was educated at the college of Aix, where he learned little—neither Latin nor Greek—but by means of a translation acquired a great admiration for Plutarch. He entered the army as sub-lieutenant in the king's regiment, and served for more than ten years, taking part in the Italian campaign of Marshal Villars in and in the disastrous expedition to Bohemia in support of Frederick the Great's designs on Silesia, in which the French were abandoned by their ally. Vauvenargues took part in Marshal Belle-Isle's winter retreat from Prague. On this occasion his legs were frozen, and though he spent a long time in hospital at Nancy he never completely recovered. He was present at the battle of Dettingen, and on his return to France was garrisoned at Arras. His military career was now at an end. He had long been desired by the marquis of Mirabeau, author of L'Ami des hommes, and father of the statesman, to turn to literature, but poverty pre vented him from going to Paris as his friend wished. He wished to enter the diplomatic service, and made applications to the ministers and to the king himself.
These efforts were unsuccessful, but Vauvenargues was on the point of securing his appointment through the intervention of Voltaire when an attack of smallpox completed the ruin of his health and rendered diplomatic employment out of the question. Voltaire then asked him to submit to him his ideas of the differ ence between Racine and Corneille. The acquaintance thus begun ripened into real and lasting friendship. Vauvenargues removed to
Paris in 1745, and lived there in the closest retirement, seeing but few friends, of whom Marmontel and Voltaire were the chief. Among his correspondents was the archaeologist Fauris de Saint Vincens. Vauvenargues published in 1746 an Introduction a la connaissance de l'esprit humain, with certain Re flexions and Max imes appended. He died in Paris on May 28, The bulk of Vauvenargues's work is small, but its interest great. His real strength is in a department which the French have always cultivated with greater success than any other modern people—the expression in more or less epigrammatic language of the results of acute observation of human conduct and motives, for which he had found ample leisure in his campaigns.
An edition of the Oeuvres of Vauvenargues, slightly enlarged, appeared in the year of his death. There were some subsequent editions, superseded by that of M. Gilbert (2 vols., 1857), which contains some correspondence, some Dialogues of the Dead, "characters" in imitation of Theophrastus and La Bruyere, and numerous short pieces of criticism and moralizing. The best comments on Vauvenargues, besides those contained in Gilbert's edition, are to be found in four essays by Sainte-Beuve in Causeries du lundi, vols. iii. and xiv., and in Villemain's Tableau de la litterature francaise au XVIIII'te siecle.
See also M. Paleologue, Vauvenargues (189o) ; Selections from . . . La Bruyere and Vauvenargues, with memoir and notes by Miss Elizabeth Lee (1903) ; E. Gosse, Three French Moralists (1918).